It’s that time of the week once more for a new edition of Whewell’s Gazette your weekly #histSTM links list, which brings you all the histories of science, technology and medicine that washed up on the shores of cyberspace over the last seven days.

The scientific event of the week was without doubt the Transit of Mercury that took place on Monday 9 May and was followed live with telescopes with sun filters and indirectly through numerous Internet feeds by people all over the world. Whilst by no means as spectacular or as rare as a Transit of Venus, which can be followed with the packed-eye (protected of course with transit glasses) the Transit of Mercury remains a symbol of the seventeenth-century transition from a geocentric to a heliocentric world view.

Observations Mercury and of the Transits of Mercury did not begin in the twenty-first century so it is only natural that the historians of astronomy got in on the act last week, too. In the selection of posts and articles that follow we have, the historical background to the first transit observation by Pierre Gassed in 1631. We also have a post on the role that early observations of Mercury played in Copernicus’ De revolutionibus. There are also posts on historical transit observations by Edmond Halley and Captain James Cook.

If you missed out on the excitement on Monday then you will only have to wait until 11 November 2019 to make your own historical observations.

Dorothy Hodgkin was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1964 for her studies using X-ray crystallography, with which she worked out the atomic structure of penicillin, vitamin B-12 and insulin. Image credit: Science Museum / SSPL

Figure 1: (Top) When dark particles are placed on the back of a violin vibrating on resonance, the particles move to the vibrational nodes. The resulting patterns, known as Chladni figures, depend on the vibrational frequency and provide a visual manifestation of each resonance. (Bottom) Poulain and colleagues [1] observed Chladni patterns when they placed microparticles within a liquid above a thin oscillating plate in a microfluidics device. Because of the fluid dynamics in their device, the particles were, unlike the particles on the violins, transported away from the nodes (dashed white lines) and towards the vibrational antinodes.

An overhead view of the Skylab Orbital Workshop in Earth orbit as photographed from the Skylab 4 Command and Service Modules (CSM) during the final fly-around by the CSM before returning home.Source: Wikimedia Commons